9 Films That Forced You To See The Wrong Version In The Cinema

7. A Complicated Process Meant Only A Handful Of Prints Exist - Seven

If it hadn't been for an accidental clerical error we could have ended up with a very different version of Seven. Renowned among the studios as the head-in-a-box film, later drafts of the script eventually lost that key element, making it a typical, if still quite dark, cop drama with the usual shootout finale. David Fincher, however, was sent an earlier version of the script and refused to direct the film without the original ending. The attention to detail on Seven was intense. John Doe's flat alone is exemplar; each of the killer's journals was handwritten with real psycho babblings, even though most of it would never appear on screen. But it wasn't just in set design that the film worked hard to define its visual style. When developing the prints of the movie, the silver nitrate was kept on the film, rather than being removed as normal (in a process imaginatively called silver nitrate retention). The practical effect of this was that when the film was played the lighter parts of the scene appeared much brighter than normal, complementing the films already dour visual design. Being a costly process, only a limited number of prints were made and thus most cinemas got unaffected films that don't have the same brightness; only a lucky few got to see it properly.